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Professor Alastair Buchan elected to American Neurological Association

The Head of the Medical Sciences Division and the Dean of the Medical School, Professor Alastair Buchan has been elected as an Honorary Member in the American Neurological Association (ANA).

Honorary membership is the highest honour that the ANA bestows and is reserved for individuals who have made unique contributions to neurology and neurological sciences. Professor Buchan will be presented his membership at the ANA Annual Meeting in New Orleans later today.

Since 1986, Professor Buchan has practiced as a neurologist and neuroscientist in Stroke Medicine. He is currently Professor of Stroke Medicine in the Radcliffe Department of Medicine of the John Radcliffe Hospital where he is also an Honorary Consultant Neurologist. He is a Professorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Professor Buchan was educated at Repton School, studied at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard and undertook Medicine and Neurology Specialty training at Oxford and Imperial. He completed the Neurology Residency Training Program in London, Ontario, Canada and specialty training as a Clinical Fellow at Cornell University Medical College in New York. His research interests are in neuroprotection following ischemia and his clinical research is in intervention, thrombolysis, and neuroprotection in acute stroke.

He led the Calgary Stroke Program at Foothills Hospital and was Heart and Stroke Foundation Professor of Stroke Research at the University of Calgary from 1995 to 2005. His team pioneered the introduction of thrombolysis in a community setting which led to both the Canadian CASES and FASTER studies.

Among his many notable achievements, Professor Buchan established the Acute Stroke Programme, led the Oxford Clinical Research Facility and the new Acute Vascular Imaging Centre, and was the founding Director of the Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. He became Head of the Medical Sciences Division of the University of Oxford on October 1 2008 and Dean of the Oxford Medical School in 2007. The medical school has held the top rank worldwide in Clinical, Pre-clinical and Health since 2011, in the Times Higher Education subject rankings.

Professor Buchan has made several significant contributions to cerebrovascular disease. His clinical interests remain in acute stroke and stroke prevention and the opportunity to derive large data sets with respect to clinical trials in thrombolysis and neuroprotection and the stratification of these patients through quantitative image analysis, such as the ASPECTS score. His basic research into mechanisms of cell death following cerebral ischemia has recently resulted in a new finding, which suggests that the tuberose sclerosis (TSC 1) gene product Hamartin confers neuroprotection against ischemia by introducing autophagy.

On hearing the news, Professor Buchan said: “I am both delighted and honoured to receive Honorary Membership from the American Neurological Association, the world’s leading institution of neurologists, many of whom have been my mentors and leaders since my early training at Cornell."